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Works in Progress: The

Radical Spanish Empire
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From the Editors: The Not Even Past Works in Progress series highlights groundbreaking
new research that is not yet published. The idea is to give our readers a rst look at
current projects and upcoming publications. As the rst in the series, we are fortunate
to feature an important new work, The Radical Spanish Empire: Petitions and the
Creation of the New World, under contract with Harvard University Press.

The Radical Spanish Empire: Petitions and the Creation of the New World (Harvard
University Press, forthcoming) by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra and Adrian Masters

Our book emerged from several years of conversations as Adrian was working on his
dissertation on petitioning in 16th century Spanish America. Adrian demonstrated that
hundreds of thousands of royal decrees were not just top-down ats by a
distant, overbearing, authoritarian monarch but the result of bottom-up petitions by
vassals. Adrian proved that royal decrees were simply verbatim copies of letters sent by
vassals of many social backgrounds (including male and female elites and commoners
of countless ethnic backgrounds) to the King and his Council of the Indies. This
unfolding insight led us to question the “liberal” historiography’s depiction of British
America as a democratic, free-thinking, and modern foil to its downtrodden, corrupt, and
medieval counterpart to the South. By following the ways the Spanish monarchy’s many
vassals used petitions and litigation, we began to see patterns of radical social mobility
and massive bottom-up participation that most major scholarship has failed to
conceptualize.

Privacy - Terms
Codex Reese (Yale University-Beinke) ca 1565. Detail of Mexica (Aztec) land
map. Hereditary nobility versus upstart lineages: with the Viceroy’s support,
a commoner-judge (visitador) becomes the governor of the Mexica city of
Tenochtitlan, unseating traditional Nahua Tenochtla nobilities. View Full Image.

The book is a detailed analysis of how the concept of “liberal modernity” works as
cluster of cognates, including among them “print culture,” “public sphere,”
“Protestantism,” “Scienti c Revolution,” “parliamentary democracy,” and “Enlightenment,”
that render invisible other potential combinations and paths of historical transformation.
Spanish America appears always as the inverted mirror image of these clusters.

The Radical Spanish Empire explores in great archival detail the intense “democratic”
social mobility triggered by the conquest. The category of “absolutism” as the antithesis
of liberal modernity has rendered historiographically invisible the “participatory”, bottom-
up, bitterly contested creation of all legal codes and categories (local, regional, and
imperial) in colonial Spanish America. It has also blinded historians to the
epistemological dynamism that shaped knowledge production, particularly in the
sixteenth century. The sixteenth-century Spanish Indies were characterized by intense
degrees of technological and scienti c innovation that transformed the global economy.
This massive transformation, akin to an industrial-cum-scienti c revolution in the
highlands of Mexico and Peru, was not the result of new “modern” forms of sociability
(the public sphere and printing press) but of traditional forms of bottom-up (even
secretive and thus coded) justice paperwork and vertical communication with regional
and imperial authorities, both lay and ecclesiastical.

Our conversations and investigations gradually has developed a model which explains
why the Spanish American context did not become an orderly ancien régime society
between 1530-1570, and why, when it nally matured from 1570 to 1600, its social order
was deeply alien to Iberia and much of Europe. Namely, we pinpoint how the Spanish
Americas’ gargantuan bottom-up paperwork and local archives initially frustrated
indigenous elites, powerful conquistadors, and friars. Gradually, a unique trinity of New
World power emerged: royal favor, local archives, and wealth. Vassals of all backgrounds
who mastered these three sources of power mastered a novel ancien régime built on
paper, silver, and persuasion; those who did not faded slipped into anonymity. This
dramatic century was thus not only one of violence and disease, but colossal bottom-up
participation in imperial rule, radical political and conceptual invention, social mobility
(both upwards and downwards), and wily questioning of the most cherished indigenous
and Iberian mores. This model upsets the master narratives about Spanish America’s
formative century, and exposes the myths underpinning British
liberal exceptionalist scholarship.

The Radical Spanish Empire focuses on an early modern empire of paper, Spanish
America, that experienced radical forms of social mobilization and governance that
today we associate with “modernity.” Yet these very new forms of radical modernity led
paradoxically to the constitution of hierarchical ancien regimes unlike any other in
Europe. Paperwork created Spanish America by rst encouraging massive political
participation in the business of government, collapsing through mediation and alliances
European and Amerindian power elites. This same participation, however, led to the
creation of top-down archives that not only slowed down the pace of change but also
created a peculiarly resilient new ancien regime, neither indigenous nor European. By the
late sixteenth century any individual who had royal favor, a robust personal archive, and
money could secure status and generally overcome challenges about their status and
ancestry. Our book seeks to explain this paradoxical trajectory of the early modern
Spanish American polity, poised between radicalism (cultural, political, social and
epistemological) and the immobility which we associate with societies of orders.

Indigenous petition-map (Cuaahtinchan Map #2 1540s dispute of commoners

claiming they had been displaced by Mixtec-Nahua lords from original positions
of power and they produced this map of history of conquest in the region near
Chalco-Huexotzinco.

How to theorize the Conquest? In traditional accounts, a handful of Spaniards

upended bewildered native rulers, and rapidly implemented a Catholic state modeled off
of late medieval ideals, albeit with a new absolutist and authoritarian twist. Our book
argues for a drastically different perspective. It begins by merging the New Conquest
History, with its emphasis on indigenous politics and alliances with conquistadors, to
ne-grained studies on the conquistadors’ drastic fall from power between 1530 and
1570. Quite unexpectedly, friars during this period stepped into the power vacuum
caused by these twin collapses, often claiming the power to rule, judge, and even
kill, only to lose power by the 1570s as well. The few historians who do acknowledge
the collapse of indigenous, conquistador, and monastic power tend to explain these
groups’ misfortunes as products of the Habsburg state’s absolutism, which could not
tolerate powerful elites. By contrast, we argue that this triple downfall was also due to
the Habsburgs’ harnessing of two great but little-explored phenomena: a deluge of
bottom-up paperwork against Indies strongmen, and the universal denunciations by
subjects of their feudal lords as ‘tyrants.’ For four decades, then, an ancién régime did
not take hold, as ‘tyrannical’ indigenous elites, local lords (caciques), conquistador-
governors, lesser conquistadors, and friars repeatedly found themselves crushed by
their rivals’ petitions, litigation, and witness statements.

Our work calls attention to one to the most remarkable and little-known chapters of
social mobilization and cross ethnic alliances through paperwork, namely, the
emancipation of indigenous slaves and the rise of commoners. Drawing on a deep-
seated moral and theological doubts within an Empire that assumed natives to be
vassals, but that also promoted expansion by encouraging raiding, captivity, and vast
internal indigenous slave markets, tens of thousands of slaves secured emancipation
through petitioning via summary justice before indigenous and European judges
and visitadores. Slaves often also secured some restitution and offers of resettlement.
Indigenous commoners also mobilized though petitioning and paperwork, securing titles
and establishing legal differences between cacique patrimonial property and community
property. Commoners also wrestled political power away from old elites by either
accessing political representation in indigenous municipal government or by simply
separating themselves ethnically from multiethnic polities and neighborhoods and
settling new lands.

Codex Cuitzeo. Private

archive. Britain. 1563 petition
of Otomi slave,
Francisco Quanbi, enslaved
by Nahua lords and forced
 to work in mines in Cuitzeo,
Michoacán. Quanbi (along
with 12 other slaves) demand
the return of lost property at
the time of captivity: 40
bushels of corn, 11 plum
trees, 14 pesos, and 2
baskets. Slaves – even the
once-‘untouchable’ Otomíes –
took advantage of their
paperwork access to local
o cials, high judges,
viceroys, and investigators to
undermine their local
overlords. View Full Image

The Radical Spanish Empire seeks as well to explain how non-European knowledge and
experimental science ourished through paperwork in the sixteenth century Indies.
Scholars have widely regarded ‘grace’ or privilege paperwork as a conservative genre
used by conquistadors to boastfully and repetitively assert their merit before the Crown.
We argue this ostensibly ‘hidebound’ paperwork, considered broadly within its social
context, could elicit profoundly non-traditional knowledge production – encouraging, for
example, indigenous agents to produce and maintain proofs of individual, community,
and regional privileges which reached back into the mists of time and used
epistemological frameworks unintelligible to Spanish authorities.

Here we contest the predominant post-colonialist perspective that the Spanish

conquests universally sought the downfall of indigenous epistemologies. While many
scholars have correctly noted that Catholic extirpations and other forms of violence
often quashed non-European ways of thinking, there are no coherent models to
explain why virtually all of the New World’s surviving non-European sources arose in the
1500s. Lastly, we tie privilege-seeking and gracia petitions not only to indigenous
petitions, but to knowledge-production in general – including Spanish, part-Indian, and
indigenous scienti c endeavors. Both these non-European and scienti c epistemological
frameworks which emerged in the unsettled sixteenth century all acted as auxiliaries to
a single master epistemology intelligible to all: the ‘conservative’ paperwork system
of gracia.

A fragment of
an Andean
court case
between
Domingo Sauli
Chachapoya
of Chupas,
Peru and the
would-be
indigenous
lord (cacique)
from Chupas,
the famous
don Felipe
Guaman
Poma de
Ayala. While
Guaman
Poma claimed
to be a
cacique and
produced
substantial
evidence in
court that his
family owned
land since
Inca times (his
 case also
relied on this
drawing of his
ally don
Guaman
Malque), his
local archives
constituted
insu cient
evidence. In
1600, likely in
a similar case,
o cials
exiled Guaman
Poma from
Huamanga for
fraudulently
claiming to be
a cacique.
Guaman
Poma went on
to write the
illustrated
Nueva
Corónica, a
petition and
chronicle
which is
widely
considered
one of the
greatest
artistic works
in human
history. His
story shows
the essential
role of
personal
archives in the
late sixteenth-
century social
order.

The Radical Spanish Empire argues that the Indies’ bottom-up paperwork, its distance
from the royal court, its non-European epistemologies, and its feuding factions all
produced a rich culture of textual skepticism. Scholars today frequently regard textual
skepticism as an exclusively Northern European form of thought endemic among free-
thinking liberals. Indeed, many suggest a tie between skepticism, democracy, and late
modernity. We demonstrate that the furious paperwork battles of the sixteenth century
Indies not only gave rise to a sustained culture of skepticism and doubt about the
writing-and-word-based depiction of reality in the halls of Habsburg power, but that this
skeptical culture was shared and encouraged by all Indies subjects, no matter how
humble, as they sought to transform the world through paperwork.

Yet, despite all the immense social mobility and cultural and epistemological radicalism
triggered by European invasion of the Americas, roughly between 1570 and 1600, a new
type of ancién régime began to emerge in the Indies that was alien to the indigenous,
conquistador, and monastic feudalisms which arose and collapsed in the years 1530-
1570.

Scholars have identi ed two main reasons for this transition – the expansion of royal
power in the Indies, and the replacement of feudal labor in the core regions for a
complex, partly cash-based market economy. We add a third fundamental force to this
model: archives. The rather innocuous boxes which all vassals’ lled with both royal
privileges and money had been gradually accumulating in every household and
corporation in the Indies, in the homes of the humblest Indian widow and the mightiest
 conquistador-governor. Major paperwork battles about wealth, jurisdiction, and social
privilege hinged on these archives. The Crown, engaged in decades-long legalistic
battles against its Indies rivals, began to build one of the world’s great archives by the
late 1550s, ordering New World privileges, bureaucratically strangling its powerful foes,
and bringing about legal standardization. Increasingly powerful royal o cials – viceroys,
bishops, and inquisitors – simultaneously deepened vassals needs for archives while
often counteracting bureaucratization by creating their own patrimonial networks. These
o cials, hungry for revenue to compensate for Indian demographic collapse and
expensive anti-piracy measures, allowed the commodi cation of status, trading money
for privileges.

Códice Coyoacán. Archivo de

Simancas. Archives in mid-16th-century
Mexico are
breathtaking. Códice Coyoacán records some
30 years-worth of tribute contributions:
different genders, property sizes, the
landless, types of neighborhoods – rendered
in pictographic information unlike Spanish or
Mexica precedents. These texts reveal that
even as Spanish rulers demanded indigenous
cultures accept their domination, the
everyday backs and forths of vassals and the
Crown produced an array of new
epistemological frameworks. View Full
Image.

Money began to move entire archives, as Otomí peasants bought Moctezuma elites’
privileges, and Spaniards blackmailed rivals with Inquisition papers. Merchant families
swallowed conquistador and indigenous elite branches, seeking to maximize others’
privileges to achieve greater revenues for themselves. All around, Indies textual
production and society became increasingly ‘archival’ and commercial by the late 1500s.
By 1600, then, vassals like the part-Tlaxcallan Diego Muñoz Camargo and others needed
to master the Indies’ three cornerstones to survive and thrive: mastery of archives, royal
approval, and wealth. A new ancién régime comprised of savvy vassals, rich
bureaucrats, powerful o cials, and merchants who consumed the privileges of anemic
conquistador and indigenous lords, emerged.

The Spanish New World’s ancien régime’s rocky evolution ensured that while the Indies
did not meet liberal-democratic benchmarks, it excelled in stimulating massive
participation in rule, a culture of anti-tyrannical agitation, radical politics, widespread
skepticism, and profound questioning of previous social orders. Many of the elements
so cherished by the exceptionalist liberal British historiography were, in fact, integral to
the Spanish New World. When the ancien régime nally set root in the late 1500s, its
more ossi ed structures now presented vassals with a challenging but sometimes
attainable pathway to elite status: not through blue blood or money alone, but through
deft exploitation of paperwork. This society was neither purely feudal and violent, nor
fundamentally capitalistic. It was underpinned as well by an unlikely third force: millions
of inert and innocuous pieces of paper.

· · ·
Dr. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra is the Alice Drysdale She eld Professor of History at the
University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Adrian Masters completed his Ph.D. at UT in 2018 and
is currently a post-doctoral fellow at Eberhard Karls Universität in Tübingen.

Posted November 13, 2020

More 1400s to 1700s, Blog, Business/Commerce, Crime/Law, Empire, Latin America and the
Caribbean, Material Culture, Politics, Race/Ethnicity, Regions, Topics

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